”The witching hour, somebody had once whispered to her, was a special moment in the middle of the night when every child and every grown-up was in a deep deep sleep, and all the dark things came out from hiding and had the world all to themselves.”~~ Roald Dahl ‘The BFG’
My life experience in the last 5 years has been one of ‘dropping out of the matrix’ of Modern Western Life~~
work
to make money
to buy things
to make me happy with a life focused
on work
to make money
to buy things to make me happy…
spinning into infinity.
It broke me.
But that’s not completely true.
The cycle didn’t break me.
Workplace Bullying broke me.
Pressure to achieve, rush hour traffic, social obligations, multitasking…
System Overload.
The Gears were Stripped.
Looking for work became painful.
I developed insomnia, accompanied by nightmares about traps and conspiracies and humiliation…
so I withdrew.
Stop the world, I’m out of here.
The signal I was getting from my dreams, from my body, from my moods, was that I was in crisis.
I developed a need to be rescued.
I had not experienced these thoughts since adolescence.
It became a psychological death-spiral.
Fear. Despair. Escape. Futility. Depression.
My Dark Side.
When it comes out in dreams, we call it Nightmare.
We feel the fear & let it go. It was only a dream…
When it comes out in the arts, we call it Catharsis.
We laugh,
we cry,
we see the zipper up the monster’s back or the cartoony cgi-effects.
We feel better.
When it comes out in the culture, the neighborhood, the nation, we call it Injustice.
Evil.
We blame it on Others.
They. Them. Those Monsters.
In the Wee Hours…
The Witching Hours…
The time when the whole world is asleep…
It is our own Dark Side who comes out to play.
It is the Stranger we fear in others.
We cannot see It in ourselves.
What’s more, we edit it out of our lives.
We carefully rearrange our reality to exclude any reminders…
We compartmentalize, sanitize, rationalize
We look at the world through filters of expectations and assumptions
Perception is 9/10th of the law.
What happens when those filters break?
The psychological term is Cognitive Dissonance.
Seemingly opposite “realities” cannot exist simultaneously.
Perception breaks down.
For a moment, Reality ceases to exist.
Some people call that crazy because that’s how it feels.
Falling down the Rabbit Hole like Alice.
Flying through a Tornado like Dorothy.
It’s the Other Side of the Mirror.
Peace comes from recognizing that.
We realize we DO have the power to change something.
Even if it’s only our own minds.
“Sometimes you have to be your own hero.”
03172013
Crazy Annie, Queen of Arts
Let Freedom Ring…
